Aggrieved users of the BC Ferries system are planning a protest demonstration at the provincial legislature in Victoria on Tuesday.

Up in the rarefied air of executive suites at the swanky new headquarters building of the debt-ridden ferries Quango — that’s delightfully apt Brit lingo for quasi-non-government organization — the ferry brass is probably not averse to a monster turnout.

A big gathering of visitors from various Gulf Islands, Northern Vancouver Island, coastal outports and First Nations communities, for example, would at least offer a glimmer of good news amid an otherwise dismal record of dwindling passenger loads.

After all, even disaffected customers will have to use ferries to get to the capital to vent their spleen. So, if there’s a big turnout for the demo, at least there’ll be a bump in ferry traffic on beleaguered routes.

Millions of visitor trips have evaporated from BC Ferries’ books since it embarked upon a policy of jacking up prices and cutting services, squeezing more and more money out of fewer and fewer customers.

By the way, interest payments on the billion dollars in debt that the ferries corporation acquired in one decade stood at $16.5 million-a-year at the end of December — pretty close to the “savings” it seeks from slashing services.

This seems to me to be a bit like somebody with a maxed out credit card whose frantic budget cutting turns out to be just enough to pay the interest and keep the collection agency at bay but not really enough to actually retire the debt.

Smarter business analysts than me have described the strategy of hiking prices in the face of falling sales and a declining customer base as entering the classic “death spiral” for a business, so it will be interesting to see where all this leads and what the bond rating agencies finally conclude about whether that debt shouldn’t really be showing up on the province’s books instead of the Quango’s.

Meanwhile, as one astute observer has noted:

“B.C. ferry fares have finally gotten so high that for every dollar they raise it will actually garner less in revenue.

“Higher fares mean fewer passengers so the accountants will have to subtract paying customers from every new dollar. And at this rate, how long will it be before they abandon the routes where they don’t make any money? How long before the provincial government abandons its responsibility to provide a public service to many of the people who depend on ferries to travel or to ship their goods?

“Our transportation minister seems to have an insatiable appetite for funding highways, if they require blacktop, and he seems perfectly at peace with providing free ferries on inland lakes in B.C., but he doesn’t seem to have the same affection for our maritime highway on the coast.

“Why don’t they say that they’re subsidizing people who live in Whistler by the massive expansion of the Sea to Sky Highway? I mean, I occasionally go up to Whistler, I suppose I benefit from that expansion of the highway, but the math they do suggests that only people who live at the end of one of these transportation routes are the people who are being subsidized. Why don’t they do that — apply the same math to the highways they build, then maintain — that they do to the ferry routes?

“Am I subsidizing people, wealthy people, who can afford a second home in Whistler?”

As I say, I didn’t make those observations.

It was Premier Christy Clark, back when she was still one of us, hosting a CKNW talk show in 2008.

On Clark’s watch as premier, though, prices have continued to escalate. Service has continued to decline. Customers have continued to dwindle. The debt has continued to rise. The transportation minister, one that she’s appointed since becoming premier, continues to maintain the fiction that somehow our ferry system is massively subsidized although 80 per cent of its costs are paid by the travelling public — precisely the opposite of what happens in Alaska where government pays 75 per cent of the operating costs and all of the capital costs.

Perhaps Clark will have some answers for the aggrieved on Tuesday. Don’t count on it, though.

To paraphrase a famous Roman who discovered that the before and after behaviour of someone courting favours differed considerably once the favours had been obtained:

What a politician says to a prospective voter, “write on the wind; write on the rushing waves.”

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